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Show Page 172 and ridicules Orson's notion of discrete intelligences, once again on the self-evident impossibility of assigning physical mass or volume to intangibles like wisdom and intellect: "Mr. Orson Pratt calls matter into existence, of which the world knows but little. He has not only 'intelligent matter,' but'all-wise,' and 'all-powerful' matter. This matter is capable of division into parts; for all matter has length, breadth, and thickness. Then we shall have the half of an intelligent atom of matter, the eighth of an all-wise atom... such are the absurdities which 'the Latter-day Saint' embraces." He goes on to impute all the evils of Nineteenth Century materialism to Orson's philosophy and condemns Mormonism as a dangerous force for atheism and social breakdown: "Here is the real perfection of materialism! It destroys man's accountability to God! There is then no such thing as praise or blame, fear or hope, reward or punishment, and consequently no religion...If their God be a material being, he must necessarily act mechanically." Taylder calls in Erasmus Darwin, Eighteenth Century materialist and grandfather of Charles, who was the bogeyman of orthodoxy in his own time - it seems to Taylder that the Mormon God conforms to Darwin's theory that mind is mechanism only, "contractions, motions, or 22 configurations of the fibres of the organs of sense." From the first, it is apparent that Taylder and Orson Pratt are speaking different philosophical languages. When Orson asserts that God is a tangible entity in man's likeness, Taylder springs to defend the God of the creeds by impugning Orson's "materialism" - thus dragging Orson into the midst of the greatest philosophical controversy of the early Nineteenth Century. Materialism, in the extreme sense, reduces"mind" to a physical process, antagonizing all believers in unembodied spirit by declaring organic mechanism sufficient explanation for human consciousness. This ancient dispute goes back at least as far as Democritus and n_ ii-..„„.!„•.„." o n w i c 0f materialism and philosophical idealists |